Domnu X

"Domnu X is the kind of person you love to hate. Having him around is not an easy job. If you want to be smug or semidoct about a subject, especially music, he will crush you down with information, he will haunt you with proof of your errors long after the debate is over. But in this annoying process you get to learn a lot. You might find incredible information about throat singing, mongolian music. underground pop genres from the slums of South American countries. You get to travel around the globe, having as guide a song from every capital of this world. You find out about Chinese old music and endure hours of manele until you get to love them. His tireless search for musical, video, film, anthropological culture & subculture makes him a modern renaissance man. Hundreds of hours of musical mixes (Ramayana Music Playground) account for thousands of hours of listening and turning every unturned stone on a given subject. His video projects (XsoUnd, Party VJ-ing) also top into an extensive research, this time on himself and the world around. Altering, destroying, transforming the immediate reality into a moving poetry. It's not easy to follow his tail of thoughts, or even understand it sometimes, but you get sucked into his reality, sometimes against your will. It's not easy to have him arround, but his curiosity and the result of it, make your life richer. Follow Domnu X MisteriX." (Minha Galera, Bucharest, Romania) "Domnu X (Mister X), like many of the cool young people in and around the various music scenes in Bucharest, Romania, has an encyclopedic knowledge of music and very passionate, particular ideas about it. As Romanian culture speeds up, and becomes more Western, consumerist, individualistic, preening and me-centered, Domnu X, an artist, VJ and music curator represents a rebellion against this current. Even the name reflects a desire for anonymity in the Bucharest culture where reputation as a doer, a tastemaker, it-boy or -girl is of incredible importance. Ask around the scenes about Domnu X by his artist moniker or by his given name, and you won't find the reputation of a TED Talk-lecturing DJ like Gojira or a rapper like Aforic or a literati cultural commentator like Cristian Neagoe. Living a simple, off-the-grid life in a small dacha-like house just outside the city, Domnu X crafts carefully curated weekly playlists for Ramayana Café on thoughtful themes and meaning-laden video works for electronic music parties. Domnu X is a rebellious lover of everything that is remnant and refuse and too slow, too weird, too Gypsy, too unacceptable by what one might call the "mainstream underground" youth culture. His philosophy and aesthetic blend analog sensibilities with digital media. Like most of the best talent in Romania (and throughout the global market), Domnu X by nature of his distaste for the culture with its emphasis on personal branding and endless self-promotion, is the kind of artist you have to work pretty hard to stumble upon. However, if you do, like the crazy old man in a handsome young guy that he seems to be, Domnu X would love to share his latest finds of weird under-the-radar people like him: the Tuvan throat singer, the Georgian harmonic chant choirs, the shamanic Ursari freestyler Bahoi de la Constanța. When I was lucky enough to meet Domnu X in 2006, quiet and shy at first, he sat me down in a beanbag chair at a café cooler than any I have ever seen in hipster Brooklyn and showed me a laptop folder of photos from the Communist era, of the kind of mementos and nostalgic signifiers that will be lost on the next generation, who, unlike X and his contemporaries, don't have early childhood memories of red neckerchief and Russian language lessons. The need to make art and to remember and preserve culture almost with a gluttonous compulsion, a need to compile and hoard, is not felt with the same desperate urgency and existential dilemma. Domnu X reminds me of an Orwellian antique store owner. It's not about twee hipster playtime, it is about something much more profound. And in a country where the right wing neo-fascists are noisy to the point where the president himself can refer to a reporter as a "stinking Gypsy," Domnu X is among a group of people who are beginning to question the accepted ethos of a white cultural elite that wants to either distance itself from the association in greater Europe with Rroma crime or celebrate an image of the folkloric "good Gypsy," who does not pimp, steal, or drive a Mercedes, and above all does not make "non-music" using pilfered Greek and Egyptian instrumentals as happens frequently in the genre known as manele. In a recent mashup Domnu X dug deep for a proto-manele ensemble from the Communist 80s, Albatros, combining it with the glitchy drum n' bass beats (the scene DX started in) of Decoder n Substance. The two things the Romanian music scenes have is willingness to innovate and stay current at lightning fast speeds combined with a fanatical purism and desire to hold on to beloved conventions and styles. Domnu X is one of these uniquely Romanian characters and I hope he can influence from outside the pale because his, and other quietly pissed off, joyful, hopeful, art-obsessed voices have a lot to say." (Toby Klinger, New York, USA) Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.